Saturday, November 26, 2011

Jennerex Biotherapeutics Inc. has a trick up its sleeve to defeat cancer.
Using an altered version of the smallpox vaccine to deliver a hefty dose of the drug into a cancer cell, tiny Jennerex has vaulted to a lead position in the busy field of oncolytic viruses. In the space of a few months, the San Francisco company has shown that its drug, JX-594, is replicating inside cancer cells and that a protein slipped into the drug sets off an immune system response to those cells.
What’s more, the company said this month, a mid-stage trial showed that high doses of JX-594 more than doubled life expectancy for liver cancer patients, compared with patients given a low dose of the drug.

Josh Turnage is your typical teenager, trying to discover what he wants to do in college and with his life. But a 7-minute, 41-second YouTube video he produced about his mother's fight with breast cancer may thrust him into a debate between drug makers and the agency that regulates them.